Many Languages

I haven't written for awhile. Things are good but seemingly "normal" so I don't always know what to write about. Jason took his second Calculus test today. He said he felt really good about it so that probably means he aced it. After his test, he came home and made a yummy curry dinner for the missionaries. I got home 15 minutes after the missionaries left, but at least I still got to enjoy the yummy dinner.

Right now at work I'm in charge of incorporating the translations for a course I designed into 16 languages: Spanish, German, French, Portugese, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Russian. What a big job that is! We have run into all kinds of formatting issues just to get the languages imported, but then once they're imported they must all be uniquely adjusted to accommodate the new language.

Here are a few interesting facts about these languages that you might not know unless you've been working with them a lot like I have.

• Thai: Who would have known that this language only uses spaces between sentences and phrases. This has been an especially difficult challenge because some sentences are so long that they don't fit across the width of the screen but you can't wrap the sentence on to the next line without changing the meaning of the sentence. We've had to go back to the translator for this problem.
• Chinese and Taiwanese: These languages are really hard to tell what you've added or deleted in tracked changes because there are so many strokes in each character that you can't see the horizontal line through the middle to know if it's been deleted or added.
• German and French: These are some of the longest languages which means adjusting margins and shrinking graphics to accommodate it on almost every page.
• Arabic and Hebrew: These languages are read from right to left so we have to re-orient the page layouts so that the activities are balanced and make better sense.
• Russian: In Russian, "personal information" should be translated to be "personal data" because if it's not, and your whole course is about personal information you end up having to do a LOT of changes after the fact.
  

Hopefully I designed a good course, because if not, 65,000 people that speak any one of 17 languages will not be very happy. :)

I bet you can't guess which language all of these words belong to?

español, Deutsch, française, português, русский, 中国, Bahasa Indonesia, 日本, 한국의, ελληνικά, ไทย, עברית, العربية